Military Fiction: THE MAC WALKER COLLECTION: A special ops military fiction collection...

by D. W. Ulsterman

  Again the Dodge lunged forward as Mac slammed his foot down onto the accelerator pedal, the vehicle’s speed quickly returning to triple digit territory.

  The chase was on.

  IV.

  Mac reached across to the passenger seat and grabbed a pair of night vision goggles, quickly placing them over his face as he glanced back to the speedometer, which read a speed of nearly one hundred and thirty miles an hour. He then turned off the Dodge’s headlights, using his night vision equipment to navigate his way down the still nearly open early morning freeway. Daylight was still at least another hour away, giving him ample time to elude the law enforcement giving pursuit.

  Behind him, the patrol car suddenly slowed down, the state patrolman likely wondering what had happened to Mac’s taillights. That brief advantage was what Mac had been hoping for as his right foot mashed down the accelerator, propelling his vehicle onto an exit ramp that led to a secondary road going in the opposite direction of the just exited freeway. The car’s wheels squealed loudly in protest as Mac took the sharp left turn at nearly seventy miles an hour, blowing past a road sign indicating the turn was to be accomplished at no more than thirty miles an hour.

  Mac grinned as he saw the secondary road was absent any traffic, this time pushing the Dodge’s speed to its limit of a hundred and seventy miles an hour, the landscape outside the car’s windows a dark blur as the sound of the pavement and the engine’s maxed out horsepower whine filled the vehicle’s interior.

  The custom GPS mounted atop the dash indicated the road would continue in a straight line for nearly four more miles at which point another exit would present itself that would allow Mac to travel west toward Evansville, Indiana, which for a typical driver would be a trip of some two and a half hours. Mac intended to do it in almost half that time. In another ten minutes, he knew more law enforcement would be scouring the area for him. That meant Mac had ten minutes to get himself long gone.

  The Dodge’s speed remained pegged at its one hundred and seventy mile an hour limit. Its fuel gauge read slightly less than half a tank, meaning Mac would likely have to refuel before reaching Evansville. An engine running at over 7000 rpm’s was not conducive to good fuel mileage.

  But damn if it doesn’t sound sweet!

  Fifteen minutes later, Mac removed the night vision goggles and reduced his speed to a more casual hundred and twenty miles an hour. There were no signs of law enforcement, his radar laser detector remained silent, and the road remained almost completely empty of traffic.

  This pace continued for nearly another hour as emerging daylight finally began to turn the outside from inky darkness to shadowy half light. With the daylight came more vehicles on the road, requiring Mac to slow the Dodge’s speed yet again to just eighty miles an hour. Evansville was just forty miles away, though the fuel indicator warning light had come on nearly ten miles back.

  It was time to refuel.

  The GPS showed the small city of Henderson Kentucky, just inside the Kentucky and Indiana border, quickly approaching. Mac decided to refuel there, pulling the Dodge off the freeway and onto the Henderson exit.

  Two miles later Mac located a large truck stop styled gas and diner. Though still early morning, the business was already alive with activity from several trucks and other vehicles moving about the area, and people walking into and out of the diner. Henderson was a city with one foot in an Old Time America of Main Street, farms, and industrial business, and the other foot wobbling atop an increasingly uncertain future. It was a mix of both rural and urban, with a once thriving coal industry the current American government seemed intent on shutting down and thus displacing thousands of jobs in the local economy.

  Mac spotted a gas pump at the far end of the second of four rows that he quickly pulled the Dodge next to. Before turning off the ignition he scanned the area, looking for any sign of having been followed or a law enforcement presence. Finding none, he turned off the car and stepped outside and made his way into the diner area to pay cash for his fuel. The clerk who greeted him was an older white woman, possibly almost seventy, with a deeply lined face, straight, shoulder length gray hair, and friendly, blue green eyes. She smiled a greeting at Mac and pointed a thin fingered hand to Mac’s car outside.

  “Good morning, young man! Looks like you’ll be on pump number seven, right? Will that be gas or diesel?”

  Mac offered a small smile back as he removed three twenty dollar bills from the roll of cash that he kept in his right coat pocket.

  “That’s gas – thank you.”

  Both Mac and the woman turned their heads at the same time to look outside as a series of shouts and screams carried across the fuel station property. The woman’s face scowled as she squinted her eyes to try and get a better look at the disturbance outside.

  “Oh my, that man looks like he aims to kill that poor woman!”

  Mac followed the older woman’s gaze and saw a large black man dragging a black woman by her hair with his left hand across the parking lot as his open right hand rose and then descended several times across the side of her head. Even though they were at least fifty yards from where Mac stood, he could clearly hear the repeated impact of the man’s hand as it struck the woman’s face and head.

  The black woman let out another series of screams as the man twisted her head around before raising his now closed right fist and then slammed it into her left cheek.

  The older woman at the counter brought her hands to her mouth as she stifled her own scream, her eyes wide in horror at what was happening in her parking lot.

  “Oh Jesus, Lord, I’m calling 911!”

  Mac found himself instinctively moving. Part of his mind realized there would likely soon be law enforcement responding to the disturbance. The other part of his mind though, was reacting to a woman in trouble at the hands of a much larger and more powerful threat, and Mac’s instincts for justice overrode any thoughts of his own safety.

  I ain’t letting that prick kill a woman right in front of me.

  “Hey, asshole you let her go and back off - NOW.”

  The black man appeared to be six foot two or so, and well over two hundred pounds, and likely no older than thirty. He turned his head at the sound of Mac’s voice, revealing a wide, round face, receding hairline, and eyes that indicated a man under the influence of some serious amphetamine-based stimulant.

  “Not your business, old man. Move your tired white ass along before I kill you. Woman thinks she can disrespect me? She needs to recognize!”

  The man raised his right fist again and brought it down against the left side of the woman’s head with a sickening, wet crunching sound. The woman was barely conscious, too weak to scream, her left eye already swollen to the point of appearing to be falling out of her skull.

  Mac’s years of military training had already spotted the unmistakable outline of a gun weighing down the right pocket of the black man’s track suit jacket. He also determined if the woman was hit with such force again, she might very well die from the blow. Far off in the distance the sound of approaching sirens grew louder.

  “Sir, you let her go and step away. Let her go, get back in your car, and I go back to minding my own business. Otherwise, you have to ask yourself if you’re ready to die here – right now.”

  The man’s head again turned toward Mac, the eyes even more glazed with a manic shine than before. A light rain started to fall onto the pavement of the parking lot.

  “Want some of this too? You want some? Think you a cop or something? I told you to move along, old man! You not understand me? Cop or not I don’t give a shit. Kill your white punk ass either way.”

  Mac could see the man’s right side tensing – he was thinking of going for the gun.

  “Don’t do that. Calm down and think this through. Don’t pull that weapon out - you’ll be dead quick if you do. Just let her go and back away. The police will be here soon. You can just leave her there and drive off. I’m willing to let you do that, just d
on’t be hitting her anymore.”

  The black man’s eyes took on a childlike glee, a sly knowing as if he believed he had a secret Mac wasn’t aware of. They were the eyes of a man beyond reason, beyond logic, beyond thinking they could actually die for their actions. Such were the effects of shitty street drugs – it made even the most pathetic creatures feel a momentary, and quite false, sense of invincibility.

  Son-of-a-bitch is gonna try and shoot me.

  As Mac watched the man’s .357 make its way toward him, his reflexes went into full-on survival mode. It was at such times the years of intense military training simply took over every cell of his body, and left him almost like an inner observer of his own actions.

  The man never had a chance to fire his weapon, so fast was Mac Walker’s well practiced and battle tested movement of removing his own MK25 from its holster and firing off two lightning fast rounds into the left side of the other man’s temple, both shots within a half inch of one another. The entrance wounds left an almost clean, precise like appearance, but the other side of the head exploded into a temporary rainstorm of blood and skull fragments.

  Mac knew the man was dead before the body collapsed onto the pavement. He felt no satisfaction in having killed him, only a brief sense of relief that the woman was still capable of movement as she began to slowly push herself across the parking lot, her legs moving awkwardly behind her. Mac worried that though she still lived, the blows to her head might have resulted in permanent brain damage.

  What happened to the sirens?

  The approaching sirens from moments earlier had gone strangely silent.

  The woman on the ground struggled for breath as blood from her now disfigured nose pooled at the back of her throat. Mac moved quickly to kneel beside her and move her head to the side to help prevent her from choking on her own blood.

  “Gonna be help coming soon ma’am. Hang in there.”

  The woman’s right hand clasped Mac’s own right hand tightly as her body was racked with another series of blood spattered coughing. Her right eye glanced upward at Mac’s face as she nodded her head and whispered to him.

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Mac looked back toward the diner and saw several faces peering back out at him through the windows. The woman working the counter stood on the other side of the entrance door, talking into a phone. There was still no sign of local law enforcement.

  Mac removed his jacket and gently placed it under the woman’s head. The woman, sensing Mac intended to leave, grasped onto his hand even more tightly.

  “Please…don’t leave me.”

  Mac’s eyes scanned the parking lot but only saw a few faces peeking out from behind vehicles looking back at him, uncertain if he was friend or foe, only certain that he has just killed another human being.

  “Can I get some help here?”

  The woman’s breathing was becoming increasingly labored. Mac feared she might have had a collapsed lung, possibly caused by a fractured rib.

  “I’ll be right back, ma’am. I promise.”

  Mac rose up and walked quickly back toward the diner entrance. He was surprised to see the older woman who had greeted him so kindly just moments earlier look back at him in alarm and lock the front door.

  What the hell is going on?

  Mac stood just outside the diner entrance looking back in at the older woman and the faces of five other people. He realized that without his jacket, his holstered gun was now easily visible from its location below his left armpit.

  “You folks aren’t in any danger from me. This lady out here needs an ambulance quick. Did you call 911?”

  The older woman nodded her head quickly that she had.

  “Ok, good. They should be here by now though. How far off is the nearest hospital?”

  Mac could hear the older woman’s phone ring from inside the diner. He watched as she put it to her ear, looked back at him, and then began backing away from the locked entrance door. The situation and these people’s behavior was quickly moving from odd, to downright bizarre.

  Mac’s shadow cell rang. The source of the number wasn’t shown.

  “Yeah – this is Walker.”

  There was a brief pause before a familiar voice spoke softly back at him. A voice that accompanied a body Mac had made love to, who he had taken an assignment from, and who then had betrayed him and his team for their unwillingness to kill a United States ambassador.

  It was Dasha Al Marri.

  “Hello again, Mr. Walker. I want you to listen very carefully to me right now. Very-very carefully, Mr. Walker. All of those people at that gas station will be killed if you don’t do exactly what I say. And not only them, but the local law enforcement who are soon to arrive there will be killed as well. Do you understand?”

  Mac glanced back at the people inside the diner, and then over to the black woman lying on the ground in the parking lot.

  “What do you want, Dasha?”

  Mac could sense Dasha smiling on the other end of the phone.

  “I want you to simply stay put, Mr. Walker. Give yourself over to the local authorities. That’s it. No running, no fighting your way out of there. If you follow this simple request, all of those people will go back to living their mundane and boring American lives. If you don’t agree to my terms, you, and them, will all die together.”

  “Why should I trust you, Dasha? How do I know you will leave them alone?”

  Dasha’s sigh filled Mac with hot fury.

  “You really have no choice, Mr. Walker. You should be seeing proof of my threat very soon.”

  The hair on the back of Mac’s neck rose up as he detected a faint and all too familiar buzzing sound – the very sound he recalled hearing more than once during the failed and deadly assignment in Benghazi.

  The sound of a drone.

  V.

  Mac Walker sat in the holding room of the Henderson Police Department. A full SWAT team, two other police cruisers, and an ambulance had arrived within minutes of his conversation with Dasha at the gas station. If not for the drone’s presence, Mac might have taken the chance of escape. He feared Dasha’s willingness to kill innocents though, and so, allowed himself to be captured by the local authorities, as she had demanded.

  He had sat handcuffed in the small ten by ten holding room for nearly thirty minutes. The room’s walls were an off white, the metal framed chair a dark grey, which matched the table in front of him.

  The room’s only window allowing a view to the department’s main area outside the holding room was a small square in the upper middle half of the metallic entrance and exit door. Mac could see several officers walking past the room, but none had yet entered to speak with him since they first brought him in and sat him down.

  Finally, after an hour of waiting, the holding room’s door opened and the Henderson Chief of Police walked in alone, closing the door behind him.

  He was a tall black man, with wide, rounded shoulders and an ample middle aged paunch that hung over his belt. The sheriff’s expression was one of cautious friendliness, his large brown eyes looking down at Mac for a moment before he sat in the only other chair in the holding room.

  “Mr. Walker, I’m Sheriff Green. Baxter Green. You’ve given us quite a bit of excitement this morning.”

  Mac looked back at the sheriff and shrugged.

  “Not my intention Sheriff – just helping a woman in need. She going to be ok?”

  Sheriff Green’s mouth widened into a smile as he nodded his head.

  “She’s going to be fine Mr. Walker. Going to take a bit of time, but the hospital says she should make a full recovery.”

  Mac was pleased to hear that. He stared back at the sheriff, who in turn was sitting silently in his own chair doing the same to Mac.

  “So what now Sheriff? You have my statement. The guy was armed, intended to kill me. It was self defense.”

  Sheriff Green nodded to Mac, though his eyes betrayed an inner conflict.

  �
�Yeah, we have your statement Mr. Walker. And statements from the witnesses at the location seem to corroborate your version. We haven’t taken a statement yet from Ms. Taylor – the woman you saved. We should have that done in the next few hours though.”

  Mac, with his hands handcuffed behind him, leaned forward in his seat.

  “So why am I still here Sheriff Green?”

  “This is a murder investigation Mr. Walker. All due respect, but we have to be as thorough as possible. You’ll be here for a bit longer yet. You can understand that, right?”